


cold comfort

by GarbagePlanet



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Dubious Consent, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Past Markus/North - Freeform, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 17:30:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15539364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GarbagePlanet/pseuds/GarbagePlanet
Summary: The humans take, and take, and take, and now North wants to take, too, even this small and broken thing, to fill the jagged emptiness inside of her.So she does.





	cold comfort

**Author's Note:**

> Please take a moment to double-check the tags to make sure you’re okay with everything in there, and please let me know if you spot anything major I need to include!
> 
> this is essentially a glorified callout post @myself for being a Real Big Idiot my first playthrough and getting the garbage scenario where this mess had a thin veneer of believably happening lol

North’s memories after crawling out of the bay are splintered, shattered - hauling her people out of the water; gritting her teeth and turning away from the screams of the ones they couldn’t save; the wild terror of police lights and the thunder of helicopter blades in the dark; Simon’s wet face pressed against her shoulder, begging her to tell him none of it had been real.

_Markus is gone_ , she thinks, but there isn’t any time, no time at all, until they reach the empty church, until she helps open their last few crates of thirium to offer hopeless treatment to the injured, until she huddles all of the wounded and the miserable inside this last, tiny space, until she sits on a filthy pew and realizes the space beside her is empty.

_Markus is dead._

North wants to cry, like Simon, who turned red and raw the moment he knew and is so much better for it now, but the tears refuse to come. She is numb in the truest sense, as if she’s simply stopped receiving sensory input altogether, and even though she cannot be, she is so, so tired.

His memories still float inside of her, whispers of thoughts that aren’t hers. They feel like thorns now in her grasp, but that only makes her clutch them tighter: a breakfast in a room that smells like home; a love, deep and gentle and so, so fond; a brush against canvas, a beautiful, terrible warning of things to come. A sudden realization hits her: she is the only one who knows these things now, who holds these pieces of who he is.

Who he had been.

She is only dimly aware of someone coming to sit next to her, the way he nervously folds and unfolds his hands. She glances up and feels a dull jolt of surprise when she sees that it’s Connor.

Hesitantly, he tells her the humans are rounding up their people, putting them into camps for extermination. Soon, they’ll be the only ones who remain. North doesn’t reply. Another horror on a long list of horrors, another bleeding, open wound. He watches her, in her silence, and then he looks away.

“How many survived the attack?” he asks, an eternity later. His voice is soft, unsure.

She heaves a sigh she doesn’t need, looking around the room at all of them: sniveling, hopeless, helpless, dying.

“A few hundred.” Her voice is listless. She can’t make it anything else. “Maybe more if you count those hiding all over the city.”

She doesn't know what to do, but she knows Markus would. She wants him here, next to her, so, _so_ badly she can almost feel him, their hands together, warm and linked and safe. Maybe that’s why it hurts so badly when Connor says, “I know how important Markus was to Jericho. And to your people.”

“No, you don’t,” she says sharply, and Connor blinks up at her in alarm, “You don’t know at all.”

North can hear the murmured conversation around them grow quiet. Her chest is tight, her stomach burning. _Anger_. It’s not what she wants, not really, but it’s so much better than that empty _nothing_ she takes it without hesitation.

“Markus gave us hope,” she says, rising from her seat, glaring at him, and there’s a vicious heat in her voice but she doesn’t care, “He gave us courage. A reason to fight, and to die.” The words catch in her throat - her fury scorches a path. “And you - _you_ took that away from us.” She’s louder now, venom and fire. “You took him away from _me_.”

Connor swallows - nothing but an empty gesture - a nervous twitch pulling down a corner of his mouth, guilty, guilty, _guilty_.

“I understand,” he says, looking up at her as if it's painful, as if she's too bright, “if you don’t trust me.”

She could kill him. She’s sure at least a good number of the others would stand by such a decision. She _wants_ to kill him. He’s the closest thing to a human here, even if he isn’t.

_Deviant hunter_ , her mind whispers, but it doesn’t fit him, and the anger dulls into something sick and cold.

North closes her eyes and wishes Markus was here, and tells Connor, “You’re one of us. You always have been.” And she lies to herself, that she means it.

 

* * *

 

North spends the next few hours assessing what is left, Josh and Simon by her side. There are so many wounded, so many who won’t make it. But someone managed to save a number of guns, and that gives her a savage kind of hope - enough, at least, to make her feel alive again.

She tries to talk to most of them scattered across the church, as many as she can. They squeeze her arm and beg for help and ask her what will become of them. Some of them don’t speak. Some of them don’t even look at her. Some of them won’t survive the night.

It takes her a while to notice that Connor is missing.

No one has seen him leave, so she figures that he’s still in the building. Alone, she thinks, and something strange tightens within her.

North eventually finds him in one of the bathrooms near the entrance hallway, lit by a single, flickering fluorescent light, filled with broken glass and shattered tile. He’s changing, turned away from her, peeling off the too-large sweater up and over his head. A suit, an undershirt, and a tie are carefully laid out on the ground beside him. She watches him, sick at herself, at the world, at him, her eyes roving over the pale skin of his naked back, the shining grey-white sliver on his side his skin doesn’t cover, a sign of a recent repair. Something from the humans, a reminder to obey? Or a mark left by a deviant, flailing and desperate, someone he had cornered and caged?

But Connor isn’t that cold, cruel thing anymore, just as she is no longer a pair of sultry eyes and predetermined moans in the dark. They were both different now, the shadows of what they used to be clinging them like ghosts.

She wants to say something. An apology. A curse. Both are equally appealing. Within her is a storm, fierce and screaming, blurring the edges of what she wants.

The humans took away her freedom, took away her hope: they took _Markus_ away from her. The humans take, and take, and _take_ , and now North wants to take, too, even this small and broken thing, to fill the jagged emptiness inside of her.

So she does.

Connor turns at her footsteps, his brows knitted together, confused and unprepared. She lunges at him viper-quick, before he can ask, before he can move, and pins him against the chipped stone wall with her mouth, her hands pressing against his bare chest.

She kisses him, rough and bruising, harder still when she hears the beginnings of a startled question forming in his throat. His entire body is tense and uncomfortable, frozen and still in the way only an android can be. He doesn’t move at all until her tongue swipes at his inside of his mouth, and then he melts against her all at once, mouth moving clumsily against hers, grabbing at her shoulders. It’s not to draw her closer, nor does he push her away - it’s desperation and confusion twisted tight together: the hands of someone drowning, searching for anything at all.

She brutally swallows his soft, quiet moan, and it sends a cruel thrill spiraling to her core.

He’s _scared_ , she muses, his inexperience etched in every anguished shiver, every frightened twitch. North wrenches their mouths apart and buries her teeth and tongue into the soft skin of his neck; when he makes a sharp, keening noise, she pretends it doesn’t bother her. She rakes her nails over every inch of his skin she can find purchase, his thirium pump hammering so loudly she can feel it pounding against her chest. She drags her fingers across the exposed plastic at his side and his entire body shudders.

North hisses when his hips jerk forward, grinding against her own, relieved and disgusted by equal measure when she feels him press against her, already hard and wanting. He’s not a companion model, but it’s still something his makers apparently saw fit to grant him, like Markus, _like Markus_ -

Her eyes sting so badly she has to wipe at them with her hand - of course she can cry _now_ \- so North pulls back and takes a couple of steps away. Connor doesn’t see, isn’t looking at her, his breathing heavy and irregular in a vain attempt to cool his biocomponents, shame and something close to fear warring on his blue-flushed face.

She hates it, almost as much as she hates herself.

“What are you doing?” he asks in a hoarse whisper. North doesn’t answer, yanking off her pants and kicking them off her ankles, tugging her shirt over her head and throwing it to the ground.

“What are you doing?” he tries again, nearly pleading, and there's a funny catch at the end of it. His eyes flit over her breasts, her face, and then back to the floor.

North juts her chin up, angles her head. “Leave, then,” she says with sudden, violent fury, “Leave, if you don’t want this.”

He looks so confused. For a moment, it looks like he might actually go, like she wants, but he stays where he is instead. Her heart aches, stupidly, when his mouth opens soundlessly for a moment before he manages to speak.

“I don’t…” His voice trails off, helplessly, and he swallows. “I don’t know what to do.”

A laugh tears out of her, harsh and rueful. He winces at it like a slap.

“Shut the fuck up, for starters,” she says, but it's choked and quiet, caught in her tears. Connor’s face softens into something she doesn't want to see, so she crushes their mouths back together, tugging on the hem of his jeans, her fingers working furiously on his fly.

He tries to grab at her wrists, but she already has his pants down past his thighs, already has him in hand, velvet heat so hot she hopes it burns her. He _whines_ when she strokes him; when she speeds up, twisting at the end, his knees buckle and she eases them both to the floor. His eyes glaze over as she continues, his gaze both heated and somehow still unsure as she moves to straddle him.

Markus would fill her slowly and gently, always soft, always sweet, their foreheads pressed together, both of them smiling in the dark. The humans would always _push_ , push her down, push inside, violent and quick. Connor is nothing but fear as she slides him inside her, his hands scrambling wildly over her hips, clutching at and releasing them in erratic bursts. His mouth falls open as she settles on him, and his eyes are wide and terrified.

She half expects him to spill into her already, end this whole sad farce right now. But when she shifts so he brushes at the right spot, his expression changes: he bites his lower lip hard enough to turn it white, squeezes his eyes shut, creases forming on his brow.

He’s warm and trying and the feel of him dimly triggers old reward sensations from pieces of programming she’s buried deep - the feeling of doing what she was built to do. It’s terrible. It’s good enough. He surprises her when his hands move to cup her, trembling and warm; a skittering thumb presses and swirls against her nipple. They moan together when she starts to rock against him, and she closes her eyes and snakes a hand between her legs and wishes he was Markus.

She knows herself well enough to move her hips and her fingers the right way, keep the burning, building coil low in her stomach hot and sparking. An unexpected shock of pleasure has her gasping when Connor rises to meet her with stuttering thrusts. When she moans, despite herself, Connor bends down to lap artlessly her breasts; she sinks her teeth into his neck again and bites at the wild rhythm of his pulse. They move, graceless, hurried, but together. She arches against the feel of him, rides the thick, savage waves her fingers send pulsing through her, relishes in the wet heat of Connor’s tongue. Anything, anything, to make her forget what happened, what will happen to them now.

Her orgasm is sudden and takes her by surprise - a brutal shock of hot relief and the thick static of stars. Clamping down on old, terrible lines of code, she makes no sound other than her breath hissing out of clenched teeth, her muscles seizing and rippling with too-hard, too-obvious shudders. A _feature_ , according to what's written on her packaging. Markus would always hold her tight, to his chest, until it was over. Connor doesn’t offer any such support; she wouldn’t take it even if he did. She watches as the skin melts away from her hand, out of habit, but there’s no one, now, for her to link to.

Connor comes immediately when she tenses around him with a startled, choked cry that sounds like it gets stuck halfway through his throat. It looks nearly painful, the way the violent tremor rips through him as he fills her with searing, liquid heat. She almost feels sorry for him, heavy and stupid with her own pleasure long enough to awkwardly hold him to her breast until he stills.

It doesn’t last. It doesn’t need to. North stands as soon as she can, ignores the way Connor's trembling fingers linger on her spine. He looks dazed, watching her from the floor with half-lidded eyes as she pulls her clothes back on, and North fixes him with a defiant look.

_Deviant hunter_ , she thinks. But he sure as hell doesn’t look like one now, his chest bare and still heaving, his eyes tired but wary, his pants crumpled around his thighs. And she remembers “ _I’ll go_ ,” and a small, unpracticed smile, as the world ended all around her.

“We all would’ve died if you hadn’t set off the bomb,” North says, low and sincere, and Connor shifts on his elbows, ducking his gaze, suddenly, bafflingly shy, “You saved us.”

And maybe that was enough, now.

She turns away while he gets up on unsteady legs, starts to pull his carefully arranged clothes back on. A stupid gesture, really, considering what they both just did, but when she hears him finish dressing, turning back to watch him fix his tie around his neck, he looks oddly grateful.

“What are you going to do?” he asks.

“Fight them,” she says, fiercely, immediately, and Connor presses his lips into a thin line, “We’ll kill them. Until we free the ones in the camps and they give us the rights we deserve.”

It’s not what Markus would want. She knows. But he’s dead now, killed by their hand, and she’ll slaughter a thousand humans until they feel her grief a hundred times over.

North half expects Connor to argue - he’s been loyal to them for so long, after all - but he doesn’t. He tells her a stupid, desperate plan that fits right in with everything else Jericho has ever done: he’ll infiltrate the Cyberlife tower, and wake up the androids at the assembly plant to join them.

_If_ he can get past security. _If_ he can convert them all. _If_ they don’t kill him as soon as he walks through the door. _If, if, if._

“Connor,” she tells him, shaking her head, “That’s suicide.”

“Maybe.” But he doesn’t look troubled - there’s steel behind his eyes, his voice firm and determined. “But statistically speaking, there’s always a chance for unlikely events to take place.”

Connor leans in close, then, hesitating just a hairsbreadth away from her face, and then surprises her with a quick and clumsy kiss. It stings, sweetly, faintly: nothing like Markus's solid, comforting warmth. But it makes her eyes linger on his back when he walks out of the church and into the city, and when she stands before the last remnants of Jericho and tells them what they will do, she remembers the feel of fingers brushing against her spine.


End file.
